Enhanced oil recovery methods are utilized to increase the amount of crude oil that can be extracted from an oil field. At small scales (channel sizes on the order of nanometers or micrometers), fluids can behave differently in that factors such as surface tension begin to dominate the system. With better understanding of fluid behavior at small scales, enhanced oil recovery methods can be improved to extract even more oil from a source rock or reservoir. Microfluidic models which can replicate conditions found in underground reservoirs have been developed to observe, evaluate, and understand physical and chemical phenomena in oil extraction and recovery.
Microfluidics and nanofluidics are considered as an important method to characterize brine and crude oil interactions in petro physics application. For understanding the physical and chemical phenomena of fluid-fluid and fluid-calcite rock interactions at an atomic scale, a nanosize calcite cylindrical channel in a nanofluidic chip can be required. This can be the case for atomic scale analysis that uses transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Conventional calcite channels in microfluidic chips can be fabricated with etched natural calcite crystals, with sizes at a micron scale.